All -
Many thanks for the content in this thread. However is there any chance someone is working on summarizing it for the Wiki?

My problem is that I rarely get to dedicate much continuous time to the task of getting my 810 to boot from external flash
(or any other task)
For instance yesterday I sat down to go thru steps 1-6,
and in this thread and this thread there are over 580 messages for the similar problem.

I got hung up at step 6, had to download it three times. Had to repair/diagnose two external hard drives for my daughter, cook several meals, vacuum, repair the network connections for the house (a wireless usb AP went down) redo the BT keyboard connection (took over 30 minutes), take out the trash, fix a door, finish grocery shopping, and all in almost random order, oh - and charge the tablet.
Then at post #288 I see new instructions for nupgrade.sh, and am wondering what else is in the other 579 posts.

So - if it's going to be "wikified" soon I'll wait rather than try to keep the posts organized in my brain.

Again - thanks greatly for at least letting me realize the possibilities.

Hi, trying to move my OS 2006 to the RS-MMC in 770. I made it to the installation of e2fsprogs. I can't seem to install it from the xterm or the application manager. Any tips? I tried activating red pill mode and changed the distro to Gregale. When attempting install from xterm, I get the repeated error "ldconfig: can't open configuration file /etc/ld.so.conf: no such file or directory." Any advice?

Point is that it looks like both partition table and FAT layout is tuned to be aligned with physical flash blocks. By creating random partition table, speed (and maybe even reliability and durability) may go down.

So maybe, if nupgrade.sh does the partition layout, it would be nice if it left at least the beginning of first FAT partition alone.

It is hard to know how important it is, maybe not much. YMMV

When I got my 8GB SDHC card I found that first 4MB of the card is 'wasted' and partition begins on block 8192. This is confirmed in the document mentioned above. There is perhaps some reason for this. I think this may be related to erase blocks and grouping of blocks for internal wear level logic. Maybe they try to prevent wearing off the beginning of the card (as it may contain some critical low level data).
This is a bit of black magic. If you are interested, start reading from page 66 of http://www.sdcard.org/about/memory_c...Layer_Spec.pdf
Looks like the size of Allocation Unit (AU) is 4MB for big cards. so it may make sense to aling beginning of partition at 4MB and data blocks after FAT table at 8MB.

That is very interesting, and it is true on both of my 8GB cards.

Code:

sfdisk -l -uM

This produces, in part, the following output (I have 8GB cards in both slots):

This strongly suggests to me that any script that partitions an SD card should start by checking the start and end points and use those values when repartitioning. I have to agree that we shouldn't be messing with the "black magic".

EDIT: Milhouse (or other file system guru), as you can see above, my cards were factory formatted with 0B FAT32, but you suggest using 0C FAT32 LBA. Why?

uname -r returns 2.6.21-omap1 which seems right to me but I still got unable to locate mbcache.ko and carried on which trashed my partition because it was writing to itself. Ah well, I got it to work fine and thanks again for the brilliant script

I just want to second this error. querty12's solution (editing nupgrade.sh) didn't work for me; I had to copy mbcache.ko from /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1 to /lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1 for it to carry on...

I'll edit this post if I have more troubles... For now, it is working, so I think I'll let it go and come back in the morning.

I have corrupted my memory card. A reinstall shows now I have divided my flash into 2 partions instead of the memory car. I now cannot reflash my N700 to recreate the fs on the card. How do I restore the old boot menu to get into the device again?

I have corrupted my memory card. A reinstall shows now I have divided my flash into 2 partions instead of the memory car. I now cannot reflash my N700 to recreate the fs on the card. How do I restore the old boot menu to get into the device again?

Any help is appreciated....

What tablet you are using and what happens when attempted to boot, 770, N800 or N810?

Since MMC is Not available, it boots to flash and bypass the USB. I had the bypass with white sceen prior and cannot remember how I solved that. I have full access to the box with Putty from both Winders and Linux.

I'm having trouble following you. It sounds from your last post like you can boot from flash but your earlier post sounds like you can't. If you're trying to reflash, first question I have is: What happens when you're attached by USB to your Windows box and use the standard Nokia flashing utility?